Zing.

So the Right had a vibrant ’sphere in the post-9/11 Warblogging Period, which drifted after the 2004 election, as frustrated soon-to-be-ex-Pajamas Media bloggers can tell you. The Left owned the YouTube era, which happened to coincide, not coincidentally, with President Bush’s second term. Their political blog infrastructure was developed largely on the participation of bloggers and blog readers, not anyone using Twitter yet, most of the time because Twitter did not exist or see any significant usage until SXSW 2007. (You know who I can’t find on Twitter? MoveOn.)

For at least a year now, the Right again has been leading the way on an Internet-based communication platform. So far it’s to organize for Conservatism somewhat broadly as a unifying cause. Top Conservatives on Twitter is not quite a MoveOn for the Right — a whispered-of but ultimately mythical animal not unlike the “Party-in-a-laptop” idea popular with some Neoliberals — but it could have more value as a list than Gingrich’s own Drill Here, Drill now efforts and even the (also short-time) #dontgo message it spawned last August.

These new conservative projects are often built around Twitter itself. Sometimes this results in really annoying tweets, but at this point the right is doing more interesting things in this space. Twitter is smaller than Facebook, but makes up for it in volume of press hits (hopefully someone with Nexis can back this up for me) and news reports that its traffic is about to go all hockey-stick. Maybe it will go Galt as well.

Conservatives also have other, much older infrastructure whose blogging component counts a few successes but still relies on decidedly Web 1.0 websites, and so hasn’t taken as big a hit in the Great Blog Crash of 2008-09. And like companies of the dot com crash (including Google itself), the concepts and websites that clawed their way out of the rubble did not and will not bring back substantial returns in the short run.

Twitter, by its sheer simplicity, is kind of a Long Tail product in that we can (and often seem to actually do) use it in spare moments between the day, which means its audience could approach that of e-mail (especially since, you know, you need an e-mail account to join Twitter). Either could build that kind of reach, depending on who experiments more through the rest of the arbitrary era proper.

Using #TCOT vs. No Hashtags Whatsoever:

According to Internet marketing blog Hubspot, the right’s #TCOT momentum means it vastly outnumbers the hashtags left-leaning Twitter users and bloggers… er, aren’t listed as using, not here at least. Hmm. So which hashtags do the left use?

Late intermission.

Turns out the left-verse doesn’t do hashtags at all, that I could see from checking these accounts on Sunday afternoon:

• markosmoulitsas
• jedlewison
• matthewstoller
• ttagaris
• janehamsher
• Atrios
• ezraklein
• glenngreenwald
• KagroX
• openleft
• mmfa
• owillis
• mattyglesias

My question for the Left is whether the port side of the Twitterverse will adopt the same habit of hashtags that moves stories — and if it does, whether it will even be led by the Kos-Greenwald-Marshall-Hamsher-Klein-Stoller-Yglesias Netroots movement. And my question for the Right is whether they know any of the Top 5 Conservatives on Twitter, because I haven’t got a clue.

Benchmark note: As of today, Markos Moulitsas (2,411) has 7,288 fewer followers than John Culberson (9,699).

Update: In the comments, @myrnatheminx — whom I tweeted alongside at TransparencyCamp during a @Leslieann44-led Sunday discussion — points out there is a website collecting progressive hashtags: Tweetleft. And as she observes, organized hashtag use lies beyond “‘the usual’ accounts.”

My reason for thinking so began after Mickey Kaus checked his e-mail inbox late last week, and asked:

Will Obama ever stop asking me for money? Or is it all fundraising, all the way out? … Not only is he still milking his supporters for money, he’s doing it in an obnoxious way, no? “Join us at the inauguration” turns out to mean “pay for other people to party at the inauguration you’re not going to”!

He’s got a point there. I’ve been on Obama’s list for more than a year now — my first post of 2008 was about how Obama’s campaign sent the year’s first campaign e-mail that New Years Day wee morning hours — and I’ve been getting (and half-paying attention to) them ever since. Here is my unofficial count (and anyone is welcome to do a recount) of the e-mails “Paid for by Obama for America” I have received in 2009, followed by that ubiquitous red button:

• Join us at the Inauguration, Jan. 3, Obama for America
• Our first guest, Jan. 6, Michelle Obama
• Be there for history, Jan. 7, Bill Clinton
• Deadline: Midnight, Jan. 8, Barack Obama
• Re: Midnight deadline, Jan. 8, David Plouffe
• Your call to service, Jan. 12, Michelle Obama

It’s a permanent campaign, all right.

He’s not President of the United States yet, I’ll give him that. But you would tend to think his fundraising goals have been satisfied — especially since his campaign let departing staffers have an extra month’s paycheck, plus their laptops and BlackBerrys (and a tip of the hat to Research in Motion’s PR department for getting reporters following AP style to not spell it “Blackberries”).

And you know what this reminds me of, as it might not remind most inside the Beltway? It’s not altogether unlike Wikipedia’s constant fundraising. As recently as December, Valleywag criticized the Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales-led on-site (always a banner across the top) fundraising drive mostly for being annoying and evidentiary of Wales being a poor leader of the website with the most comprehensive description of Regional variations of barbecue.

By early January, however, it turned out that Wikipedia had beaten its 2008 fundraising goals to the tune of $6.2 million. In the interests of disclosure as well as narrative, I’ll say that I donated as much to the Wikimedia Foundation this winter as I’ve donated in any one instance since Hurricane Katrina. So with that said, as I’ve been editing Wikipedia recently, I have often noticed this banner at the top of each article:

And what happens when you click on it? You come to a page with a letter of thanks from Wales. It looks like this:

Okay, so maybe Valleywag has a point about Wales as the public face of the website with the most informative biography of Portland, Oregon home furnishings salesman and television pitchman Tom Peterson.

And then, your eye drifts down the page to see this:

The permanent campaign, indeed.

P.S. I haven’t even mentioned that also this afternoon, Mitt Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC was asking $100 for this:

Don’t even get me started.

The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?

My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.

Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.

And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:

Grants to become a journalist, what’s next, grants to become a lawyer?

Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.

I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:

In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.

P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.

Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.

N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.

I thought so, until this dropped into my inbox a few hours ago:

Wow, Limited Edition Fleece Blanket? This must be my lucky day!

Seriously, what on Earth is Mitt Romney doing asking Republicans, who could give money to John McCain’s campaign the RNC, to give it to himself instead? If you’re a committed Republican, what’s the most responsible thing to do in the next few weeks: Give money to put television ads on the air in Michigan Iowa, or add this comfy blanket with snazzy carrying straps to your collection of campaign-branded political paraphernalia?

But wait, it gets better. Did you see the last line of the e-mail in the image above? Here it is again, for those of you who dislike squinting:

It is more essential than ever that conservative candidates and organizations have the resources they need to get their message out to voters, and that is why I am writing to you today.

I think we can safely consider this Romney’s retaliation against McCain for picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Updated, minutes later: Wow, what timing — as I was writing this very post, another e-mail landed in my Gmail account. And it looks like someone else had the same idea:

What’s her excuse? Romney did it first?

P.S. At least Romney got a crummy, non-prime time speaking slot at the RNC. Hillary can’t say that.

Later in the day, I attended a panel discussion with my colleague Soren Dayton and Peter Daou, who still remains Senator Clinton’s Internet advisor. Afterward I spoke with Daou briefly, and I mentioned the post and asked him about their e-mail plans. He confirmed that they indeed planned to continue sending e-mails to the list.

They didn’t wait long.

At right is the image from an e-mail I received late this morning. Not surprisingly, it’s an appeal for help paying down the campaign’s debt — about $22 million, $12 million of which she loaned herself. So I expect I’ll be getting more than a few of these over the coming weeks. But I promise I’ll only write about it again if it’s really interesting.

P.S. One more shout-out to Daou for helping me write Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, The Netroots and Peter Daou upon the campaign’s official launch January 2007. Yes it made him look good, but as a senior-level staffer of the front-running Democratic candidate, he was certainly under no obligation to speak with a right-of-center blogger about the campaign.

This is the second e-mail I’ve received from “Hillary for President” since she announced her (reluctant?) support for Barack Obama. Here’s the other one, which arrived almost exactly a week ago:

Well, I suppose she did give fair warning. But does this mean I’ll get an e-mail from her every week from now until the convention? Until the election? And will they have the same aspirational banner across the top?

Alternatively, is this the true end of the Hillary campaign — not with a bang, but with a whimper; not with a speech, but with an e-mail? I guess we’ll find out.

In case your eyes are as bad as mine (or you aren’t using Firefox 3.0’s nifty zoom feature) how about we blow up the relevant detail of that image:

So John McCain’s staff sends out a tribute (complete with video) to the too-soon late, great “Meet the Press” host and NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, and 45 minutes later, Barack Obama’s staff sends out a commercial solicitation. Remember the Titans vs. Buy More Stuff.

I’m reminded of WashingtonPost.com’s botched e-mail alert the morning Sean Taylor died, and just a tiny bit that recent Sunday e-mail from Newsweek that somehow managed to omit that edition’s only negative story about the Obama campaign. This one is a bit more esoteric — how many outside the Beltway are on both candidate’s e-mail lists?

Well, just about any reporter covering national politics. They matter, right? And unlike WPNI’s newspaper and magazine, the Obama camp at least has a rapid response team. I have no doubt this e-mail alert was prepared and schedulded well in advance of Friday afternoon’s terrible news. But because e-mail alerts can be timely, they must be timely. The Obama campaign must know this — after all, they beat all other presidential candidates with the first campaign e-mail of the New Year.

Would it have been so difficult to recycle a few of the candidate’s comments from earlier in the day? They needn’t even go as far as the McCain campaign did — the specially-recorded tribute video is a little more personal than McCain’s tarmac remarks early Friday afternoon, reflecting on the fact that he made 52 appearances on Russert’s “Meet”. [Update: As Sean Hackbarth notes in the comments, this was clearly something McCain himself wanted to do.]

Checking my inbox archives, I see this is the first time the Obama campaign has flogged its online store in an e-mail subject line since the last Christmas shopping season. But they have sent no e-mail acknowledging (let alone mourning) Russert’s untimely passing, and I can’t even find a release on the website. I know the Obama campaign is sort of running against insider Washington, but wasn’t Russert pretty much the best kind possible?

For anyone who bothered to open up those e-mails in succession last night or today, the juxtaposition looks like this:

 

Especially when you consider that national political reporters who worked alongside or in competition with Russert are the most likely to have noticed this discrepancy, the advantage here goes to McCain.

P.S. The McCain e-mail could use more color and better design, but they should get credit for rendering the text in actual ASCII/Unicode characters.

P.P.S. A personal favorite “Meet the Press” episode was the morning of May 27, 2007, where Russert’s calm, methodical questioning laid bare Bill Richardson’s surprising inability to defend himself on almost anything, from the serious to the trivial. Russert managed to do gotcha without seeming gotcha, and the hour-long interrogation was one of his most effective. That was the real end of Gov. Richardson’s presidential campaign. The transcript is here.

Why wasn’t Michael Isikoff’s investigative piece outlining the lobbying connections of Barack Obama’s lead strategist, David Axelrod, promoted in Newsweek’s Sunday e-mail to subscribers?

Below right, I’ve cropped the article descriptions from this list for purposes of formatting this post, but I have not removed any of the articles. Although Isikoff’s report appears in the same June 2 issue of Newsweek as the stories, it is nowhere to be found here. And it should be, especially considering that the first four articles listed are all generally pro-Obama in their tilt and three are explicitly framed as advice for candidate Obama. The other four articles cover minor issues such as Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and John McCain.

What happened? One slim possibility is that the article is online-only and thus not eligible for inclusion in a round-up of magazine stories. But this seems not to be the case, as the screen capture indicates, both types of stories are included.

Another may be that Isikoff’s story was put to bed late, and not yet finalized when the feature-heavy e-mail was compiled. Possible, but if so not an adequate defense. Like last November, when WashingtonPost.com erroneously reported positive developments in the condition of Redskins safety Sean Taylor after he was already deceased, there is no excuse for not making e-mail alerts as timely as possible.

One more reason could be that Isikoff’s article is short, perhaps taken from the front of book section that is also home to Perspectives and the up-down-sideways Periscope arrows (if you can’t guess, this week Obama is up, Hillary is down and McCain is sideways). But that doesn’t make any sense, either. As the e-mail alert says,

Dear NEWSWEEK Subscriber,

Welcome to another edition of Political Perspectives, the subscriber-only e-mail newsletter previewing and highlighting NEWSWEEK’s coverage of the political world, in print and online. This week, Evan Thomas writes what an Obama adviser might say to the candidate about how to address the issue of race on the campaign trail. Elsewhere, Holly Bailey pores through John McCain’s just-released health records and Jonathan Alter looks at the lessons we can learn from Hamilton Jordan and Ted Kennedy.

It goes on like that, but there’s no mention of Isikoff or Axelrod. As the e-mail announces, it is not merely a list of their top features but the magazine’s “coverage of the political world, in print and online.” How does Isikoff’s reporting not fall into that category?

Surely there’s an explanation I haven’t ridiculed, and surely that will be their justification. I’m not the first to suggest that Newsweek specifically is in the tank for Obama, but I think I am the first to suggest that Newsweek is burying scoops that are problematic for him.

No matter, the Isikoff story still made it into the blogosphere. But as far as I can tell, only conservative blogs mentioned it. Even TalkLeft, which remains Clinton supporter central, hasn’t picked it up. One wonders how much further it might have traveled if the magazine had deployed its considerable PR assets on the story’s behalf.

From Team HRC, arriving in my inbox at 12:26 a.m.:

Tonight’s victory in Indiana was close, and a margin that narrow means just one thing: every single thing you did to help us win in Indiana helped make the difference.

Every call you made, every friend you spoke to about our campaign, every dollar you contributed made tonight’s victory possible. And I couldn’t be more thankful for your hard work.

Every time we’ve celebrated a victory, we’ve celebrated it together. And tonight is no exception. This victory is your victory, this campaign is your campaign, and your support has been the difference between winning and losing.

Thank you so much for making this campaign possible. Let’s keep making history together.

And from Team BHO, arriving at 12:51 a.m.:

We just won a decisive victory in North Carolina thanks to people like you.

Indiana remains too close to call. But what is clear is that we did much better than all the pundits predicted, despite Republicans changing parties to support Senator Clinton, believing she would be easier for Senator McCain to defeat.

Here’s where we stand.

As of Tuesday morning, we needed just 273 delegates to clinch the nomination. When the votes are fully counted Wednesday morning, we will have gained more than a third of them in a single day.

We have a clear path to victory. But now is the time for each one of us to step up and do what we can to close out this primary.

Please make a donation of $25 right now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/results

Thank you for everything you’re doing,

It doesn’t take a sophisticated campaign observer to notice the tonal difference in those letters. Obama scored a big North Carolina victory, and even sort of rescinds his victory speech congratulations to Clinton for taking Indiana. And like her just-barely-a-victory speech last night, Hillary’s e-mail does not declare the Indiana win as signifying anything except her supporters are to be commended. The writing is on the wall; or as the case may be, in her supporters’ e-mail inboxes.

The message shifted over time, asking list members to back the Democrats’ SCHIP plan (unsuccessful), oppose the January FISA bill (unsuccessful) and sign an FEC complaint about John McCain’s campaign finances (unresolved but likely unsuccessful). In every case, the list was a call-to-action directly furthering the Leftroots’ political goals.

This week, I received an e-mail from the same firedoglakeaction@gmail.com account used to send out most of these messages. But this one was just a little different:

A few “to be sure” statements: It’s their list, anyone can unsubscribe, and Greenwald’s book is undoubtedly sympatico with their previous messages.

But let’s be clear about what they’re doing: They are making commercial use of an e-mail list subscribers joined for expressly political reasons. More to the point, the list is now being used to advertise a product by one of the list’s owners.

I have no way of knowing the reaction of people on the list who signed up out of genuine support for their cause (as the blurred name above suggests, I didn’t sign up as myself) but I can certainly imagine some will be irritated that their interest in Greenwald’s political activities implies an agreement to receive commercial solicitations on his behalf. I’m a little irritated, if that counts for anything.

I actually wasn’t going to write about this, until I heard this week that Greenwald and Hamsher barely attended the Wednesday Dupont Circle event; apparently they showed up at the very end and gave a “hard sell for Greenwald’s book.” Two is one short of a trend, but if it becomes that, they could risk squandering their readers’ loyalty.